Behind the Scenes: Glamorous Life

This week, in Talk of the Town, Claire Hoffman visits the home of Prince. He lives in a thirty-thousand-square-foot Italianate villa, built by Vanna White’s ex-husband. Hoffman talks about what it was like to meet Prince, and shares a couple of prints from his new book, “21 Nights,” a collection of stylized portraits taken while Prince was in London last year.

You had some colorful descriptions of Prince’s home: Bright-purple carpets, a Lucite grand piano, bearded men playing flutes. Is this how you imagined Prince’s home to be?

I think I imagined everything about Prince would be more bizarre, dare I even say celestial. I’ve been listening to Prince ever since I started listening to music so he’s less an artist to me and more a sort of galactic overlord. So to show up at his house and have it smell like a Pottery Barn showroom and hear Yanni on the TV was sort of shocking.

In his defense, Prince hasn’t lived there long. I got the sense that he had a sort of make-a-home-for-Prince suitcase that someone else had unpacked—a little purple velvet there, a statue here, and voila!

In your interview, Prince said the following about gay marriage: “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was like, ‘Enough.’” Did you two have a more in-depth conversation about this?

I was a little surprised when he said it, because he has always seemed so unrestricted sexually.

We were having a larger conversation about his belief system and his politics. He told me he didn’t have a horse in the November election and that he didn’t believe in getting involved with these kind of earthly contests. I had asked him if the fact that Obama was black didn’t compel him to get involved.

He said, “Why?”

And I said, Well, because you’re black.

And he said “Am I?” and held up his wrist next to my ruddy one. Indeed his skin was lighter, and he cracked up.

Anyway, he walked me into his library and opened a Bible up to the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s when he got to talking about trying to live Biblically. For what it’s worth, the way he said it wasn’t hateful so much as sad and resigned. Prince is a true believer, and I think that’s important to keep in mind in hearing his viewpoint.

We’re showing our readers some of the photographs from “21 Nights.” Are they like the photographs he has hanging in his house in, as you put it, “various states of undress”?

I interviewed the photographer, Randee St. Nicholas, who has photographed and made videos of practically every big-name celebrity. The thing she said about Prince that stuck with me was that he sees women in a way that most men don’t. He looks right at them. I felt that—he’s strangely considerate. In person, I found Prince humble and down to earth—if you closed your eyes you could imagine he was your fat old uncle and you were on the way to a (vegetarian) BBQ.